Heuristic Evaluation: Down to Earth Lessons from MIT

One of my favorite techniques in usability is simple "heuristic review". This is a sort of the "what would do" style evaluation guided by a set of questions. Debuted by Jakob Nielsen, the idea of a set of principles to evaluate as one of the most efficient ways to conduct a expertise oriented (as opposed to observation oriented) evalution has spread with lot of variants from the original ten heuristics.

This came to mind today as I was browsing the MIT Open Courseware site -- a really neat online repository of materials from the last few years of MIT classes. Yep, you can learn from the same materials as MIT students!

To get a quick feel for heuristics, take a look at this usability checklist from web.mit. For a heavy-weight engagement with heuristic review, check out the lecture notes (lesson 14) from User Interface Design and Implementation, Fall 2004. Foundational principles are discussed in Lesson 8